Whether it's something as relatively minor as cutting your hair or something potentially life-changing like going for a new job, give it a go! You could end up having an experience so great it becomes one of your best stories. You could learn a fantastic lesson that sends you on a better course. You could meet someone who sets your world on its head for a bit.
Whatever the outcome, it's worth it to try. What's the alternative? If you constantly talk yourself out of doing or trying or being anything, you're left with nothing.
I went to my last concert of the summer last night and do promise that very, very soon I will be summing up my summer with Carole King & James Taylor, Ringo & His All-Starr Band, Kevin Smith & Jason Mewes, John Mayer, and Green Day. Until then, John Mayer's latest journal entry:
Please
I’m not out to please everybody - I’ve actually been out to try not to displease anybody, and that’s even harder work. It’s like Prozac for creativity - cutting off the highs and lows and the risks and the rewards so that nobody walks away from a show or listens to an album with a passionate enough take on what they didn’t like. Maybe I’ll take ten minutes each show for the rest of this tour and just play shit I love but think might turn people off. Then when the tour is done I’m going to take a good long nap and work on becoming irrelevant. I think that’s what’s bugged me so much about the last few weeks of stupid media speculation. I’ve been hard at work since spring trying to become irrelevant in all the places where being relevant gave me a headache and made me rock my right leg back and forth and made me ask my therapist if my heroes’ ghosts would hate me and basically take a match to the bottom of any moment with half a shot of being a proud one. I think I owe it to my fans to disregard them during the making of an album. Writing music while also writing a future negative review of the music is a really great way to make slop. Of course, then I’d still be aware that I was trying to be unaware, so right there I’ve got the makings of a head-shaped hole in my own ass. Do you see what I’m saying here? If I don’t risk it all on tape soon I’m going to be in trouble. I need to be loud. Slightly out of tune. Stick around in a solo a little too long. Maybe not know exactly what I’m doing and let that be the document.
See? I almost did it again. I just told myself that I shouldn’t post this because maybe people would think I didn’t enjoy the tour I was on, which I absolutely love. I just considered the consideration, which is what I said I wouldn’t do. So now I’m definitely posting this. I’m excited. I keep talking about how I’m going to disappear on a ranch somewhere when really I’m going to go straight into a studio. But when I do I’m going to waste lots of time. Which really isn’t wasting time, it’s giving myself some room to play and jam and experiment. But I have to call it wasting time because my preset is to walk out of the studio on day two and have a “big” song with only a missing line in the bridge. I should call it what it is - being a musician and experimenting and not caring about anything else but what’s hiding inside and what I need to get out, no matter how long that takes. I need to make what I think is shit, which will be nothing close to shit. It’ll just be free.
This is how I talk when I get excited for the future but still have to live through the present. Oh, well. I’m gonna go track down a sandwich.
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